Overview

In the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul stands a huge hemispherical bowl carved from a single mass of greenish-grey granite, about 1.75 metres in diameter, its outer surface worked with a band of lotus petals near the base and, around the rim, six horizontal registers of Quranic calligraphy. It is widely known as the Buddha's alms bowl, a name that connects it to the accounts left by Chinese Buddhist pilgrims of a great relic bowl venerated in the Gandhara region in the first millennium.

The object is genuinely ancient and genuinely Gandharan, and its later Islamic inscriptions show that it continued to be treated as significant long after the region's conversion. What is uncertain, and much doubted, is whether it is in any sense the personal begging bowl of Gautama Buddha; its sheer scale points instead to a large votive or monastic vessel. The bowl is thus a striking example of an object whose antiquity and importance are beyond doubt while its specific relic identity is not.